Such a management system is already known in the art, e.g. from the article "Passive optical network for realtime use" by J. Tatsuo Koji et al, Proceedings of Globecom '85--New York, pp. 1,037-1,041. Therein a functional description is given of a management system controlling the transfer of information packets in a star network in which a plurality of user stations are connected via user links to a central star node. One of the user stations operates as main station, called Present Supervisory Control (PSVC) station and its link to the central star node may be considered as the above common link. The time slots used for upstream communication are allocated in a fixed way, i.e. without taking into account possible changes in the bandwidth required by the substations to send the upstream packets. Indeed, the main user station PSVC is able to send to the other user stations a frame header packet with time slots assigned to the latter stations and each of them detects the assigned time slot by counting the time slots until the counted number reaches its own previously assigned number. It should be noted that in the above star network information packets are transferred not only between the user stations and the main station, but also between the user stations themselves.